The Ridgewood Local Development Corporation hosted its annual Spring Street Festival this past Sunday, April 15, on Myrtle Avenue from Seneca to Wyckoff avenues. The event featured rides, carnival games, entertainment and shopping galore at the many stores and shops along the avenue.
(Photos: Michael O’Kane)

Doctor Gregory Gustafson recently returned to doing what he loves the most, caring for the hearts of Maspeth.
After opening New York Hospital of Queens’ first cardiac catheterization lab in 1994, Gustafson saw patients there for several years, but was exposed to excessive amounts of radiation.
So in 2010 he opened an office in Maspeth and spent one morning a week seeing patients in the community. However, the private practice there closed and Gustafson went back to working at the hospital as a full-time teacher.
Now he’s happily back.
“Maspeth, in the middle of a city, has this almost village-like feel,” he said in an interview last Friday in his office at 72-41 Grand Avenue. “I really, really love the personal involvement of getting to know people’s families, husbands and wives come in, daughters bring in their mothers.”
He said at the hospital, he never met 90 percent of his patients before they came in for treatment, or ever saw them again.
But in Maspeth, Gustafson can perform what medicine is really about, he said.
“Care of the soul, it’s understanding people’s lives and needs and helping them to cope with all those things and identifying the emotional issues and the medical issues that you can help them with, either by counseling them or by deciding what kind of treatments might be useful for them,” Gustafson said.
“It can be stress-related chest pain or it could be somebody who’s really about to have a heart attack that you really have to move fast on,” he added. “And you have to have the knowledge and the experience to give them counsel, have them trust you, so you can lead them to a better place where they’re not feeling so bad.”
Gustafson grew up in the hill country of northwest New Jersey, in a town of about 500 people, which is part of the reason why he feels so comfortable in Maspeth, he said.
In the beginning of his career, while practicing in Manhattan, he worked with an innovative group if invasive cardiologists, who were among the first perform invasive cardiac procedures for the purpose of assessing coronary artery disease.
Invasive cardiology wasn’t a common procedure until the late 1970s, after a wave of heart disease swept through the United States.
“Everybody was afraid to get near the heart, to touch the heart, and certainly no one was going to put something down a coronary artery to see what it looked like,” Gustafson said. “Everybody just assumed that if you did something like that, you’d kill the patient on the spot.”
Now, operative techniques that are done through catheters on a video screen as opposed to open heart surgery are used regularly.
But Gustafson said his time in the innovative world of medicine is behind him, and he’s happy doing cardiac consultations for residents of Maspeth and surrounding areas.
His private practice includes managing high blood pressure and other heart problems, previous heart attacks, bypass surgery survivors, those with irregular heart rhythms, or younger people who are looking to prevent heart problems, he said.
Although he still spends most of his time at the hospital, Gustafson makes himself available to his Maspeth patients, as many of them call his cell phone to reach him.
“I love it here,” he said. “I love my job, I love my work.”

A series of audits conducted by Comptroller John Liu’s office recently found that the Department of Finance, in some cases, arbitrarily assigns property assessments, sending co-op and condo owners on a financial roller coaster.
According to Liu’s office, the Finance Department (DOF) failed to tell homeowners of a change in its property assessment method in Fiscal Year 2011/12, which resulted in an uptick in property taxes while home costs were stagnant.
At a press conference last week in front of the Cryder Point houses on Powell’s Cove Boulevard, speakers charged that DOF officials can change assessment numbers by hand in the department’s computer system, sometimes resulting in errors.
The tentative assessment for Cryder Point rose 51 percent last year before it was corrected, Liu said.
Speakers at the conference called for more transparency for the public to see what their property values are based on, but Liu said DOF is so far only responsive to some of the audit’s suggestions.
“Homeowners shouldn’t have to stress over wild, unexpected, inexplicable swings in their property assessments and taxes,” he said.
While taxes rose 12 percent citywide last year, some co-op owners saw an average 32 percent increase in market values, according to one of the audits.
In addition, DOF did not yet explain why 10 percent of the 859 co-op buildings in Queens received higher property values than the department’s assessment formula should have allowed, the audit states.
The other audit found faulty decisions in the department’s assessments, such as comparing the value of a Brooklyn co-op to a parking lot, and assessing the value of a condominium building in Flushing by comparing it to a rental property in Far Rockaway.
However, a DOF representative countered that the “department works each year to assess more than one million properties transparently and accurately. We continue to work with New Yorkers throughout that process.”
The audits followed the introduction of two bills by state representatives that aim to keep co-ops and condominiums from paying excessive legal fees when challenging a tax assessment, as well as to stabilize assessments for two years after a challenge is won.
State Senator Toby Ann Stavisky and Assemblyman Edward Braunstein introduced the bills in March after co-ops in Bay Terrace spent $37,000 in legal fees to successfully fight last year’s assessment. As a result of the challenge, the city reduced the assessment to $11.8 million, only to raise it back to $15.3 million in January for the 2012/13 tax season.
In addition, the president’s Co-op and Condo Council recently approved a bill introduced by State Senator Tony Avella which would work to create a new property tax class, Class One A, for co-op and condo owners by capping yearly taxes at 6 percent, and 20 percent over a five year period.
“But it shouldn’t be up to these complaints and electeds getting involved, the Finance Department should have gotten it right in the first place,” Liu said.
Stavisky, who lives in a Bay Terrace co-op, said last week that residents in the area are middle class and can’t afford to keep up with drastically fluctuating taxes.
“What to me makes it worse is that the shareholders throughout the city of New York have lost confidence in the Department of Finance and the integrity of the process, and that to me, long-term, is a serious problem with the co-ops and condos,” she said.